


30 Kisses

by panda_hiiro



Category: Full Moon o Sagashite
Genre: 30 Kisses Challenge, April Showers 2015, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-28
Updated: 2015-04-28
Packaged: 2018-03-26 04:01:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 2,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3836248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/panda_hiiro/pseuds/panda_hiiro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Themes on a relationship, and a kiss for each.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. look over here

**Author's Note:**

> Salvaged from my FF.net account (wow). First published 10 whole years ago! I never actually finished the challenge, but I got a good way through it, so here's what I have.

Sometimes Meroko wonders if there is such a thing as a ghost among the dead. She thinks that, if there is, then surely, that is what she has become. It must be, because there is no other explanation for how thoroughly and completely Izumi sees past her. 

It isn't too much to ask for him to just spare one glance, she thinks. Just once. That's all she asks for. She runs the thought through her mind, over and over:

  _Look over here, look over here, look over here, just please-please-please look over here..._

 There are times Meroko believes that if she just keeps repeating it to herself, that eventually the thought will take solid form; that it will turn into a flashing sign, or a hand to slap Izumi behind his thick head, or some other form of effective communication. She changes things: a new dress, a new hairstyle, a new catch-phrase for their shinigami team. She holds non-conversations with him, talking for hours to his back; she tries crying, screaming his name at the top of her lungs, and nothing, nothing works.

 Eventually she gets tired of waiting, and she marches up to him, turns his head and kisses him right on the mouth. When she leans back, she knows for sure that this is it, this is her moment, and he is looking at her now, looking _right at her_ ; and he is looking at her and staring right on through, and Meroko feels more transparent than glass. 

 


	2. the space between

The space between dream and reality lingers somewhere nearby, an empty void he has been trying to cross most of the night. He slips and slides, fumbles towards half-imagined figures of light and sound, grabbing blindly with tiny fingers. He wonders when his hands became so small, if they were always that way: stubby fingertips, dirt crusted under untrimmed fingernails, and reaching out for something, someone; anything, anyone. 

He sees himself now, or some near-forgotten version like him because what he sees is a shivering huddle of a child, a six-year-old shock of blond hair and yellow eyes. His mother rages in the next room; the crashing and breaking and the frustrated wails of her midnight breakdown are little diluted by the paper-thin walls. His child-form covers his ears, squints closed his eyes and prays, begs, pleads for the noise to go away, for all the screaming and crying and hurting to stop.

And then it is quiet.

Izumi is vaguely aware of his surroundings now: the tousled sheets and upset of his bed, the dark claustrophobia of his tiny room, the cold beads of sweat on his forehead. His throat is dry and he speaks in a rasped whisper when he calls her name. She doesn't answer, and he doesn't know why. He tries again. The silence is oppressive in response; the absence of her voice echoes against the walls and fills the room. He cannot remember why she does not answer, or why her pillow next to him is untouched; he cannot remember the last time he held her, cannot remember the last time she whispered his name while he ran his hands through her hair; cannot remember the last time he kissed her and tasted her sweet strawberry mouth, cannot remember the last time she said she loved him. It dawns on him then that he lost her a long time ago, and he knows, knows that he lost her to some place he can never follow. He thinks on this until the pain of reality mingles with that of memory and at last he retreats back into sleep, hoping to find her hidden somewhere between the nightmares. 

 


	3. superstar

She's in love with a superstar.

She's a good fan, buys all the CDs and videos, papers her walls with posters and goes to all the concerts she can. She owns books and keychains with his name on them, an album full of photographs, and even one highly-coveted slip of autographed paper. She has all his songs memorized, sings them every time her friends invite her out for karaoke, hums them to herself when her mind wanders. She carries a photo of him in her wallet. She kisses that picture sometimes, when she thinks no one is looking. 

"He's a waste of time, Me-chan," Izumi says to her one day. 

He tolerates her blind worship of a pretty-boy rock icon, listens patiently when she prattles on about new CDs and magazines, public appearances and photo shoots. He handles it well, all things considered. 

"Takuto is _not_ a waste of time." She scrunches her face up and sticks her tongue out at him. "You're just jealous."

"He doesn't even know you exist."

"He does too! I've confessed my love for him fifty-three times already, in person, and i've sent him letters and-"

"Me-chan," he interrupts her. "He doesn't love you."

She is quiet. 

"Neither do you, Izumi."

She turns away from him, and says nothing more before she walks away. He doesn't try to follow her. 

 


	4. our own world

Meroko lives in her own little world.

She sees things the way she wants to see them: in bright, vivd colors, in rights and wrongs, in absolutes and certainties. In Meroko's world, destiny and fate exist, and everyone has a soulmate; in Meroko's world, every story ends with a passionate kiss and a happily-ever-after.

Izumi cannot understand the way Meroko thinks.

She's frill and light and _girl_ , and these are all things that he hates. He tells her that she's deluded, trapped in a fantasy, that she should look on the somber facts of reality and accept them all.

Meroko just smiles and says that there's room enough for Izumi in la-la-land, too. 

 


	5. ten

Ten candles, lit with ten tiny flicker-flames, all burning bright on a white-and-blue iced cake; it was his birthday, and his parents clapped and sang for him, and when he blew out the candles his mother leaned down and gave him a kiss on his cheek. 

In the shadows of the room Izumi and Meroko stood as silent, unseen ghosts; Meroko wrung her hands, wrinkling the black silk-satin of her gloves.

"Do we really have to do this?" 

The lingering smell of burnt wax and candle-smoke filled the room, and Izumi said nothing.  

 


	6. cassette

An old, faded song plays through the speakers of Mitsuki's pink-plastic radio cassette player: a boy's voice, cracked with static and the age of the tape, the music behind him soft and slow. No wonder Route L was so popular, Meroko thinks, because despite the poor quality of the tape, there's something about the rough, unpolished edge of the sound that makes it feel all that more real, drawing her in, capturing and enthralling.

Izumi stands in the doorway watching her, but she doesn't hear him, too caught up in the music to notice his presence just yet. She sings along, voice quiet and out-of-tune, humming in places where she can't remember the words. He watches her for what seems like a long time, listening to her more than the actual song: the way she hums over the parts she doesn't know the words to, or how she gets just a little louder when the chorus kicks in, and that her voice doesn't match with this recorded version of Takuto's at all, but it still manages to work somehow. 

Meroko's just gotten through a lyric about certain someones and missed kisses when Izumi coughs to get her attention. She jumps, startled, and fumbles for the 'stop' button on the cassette player; the music cuts off abruptly and she stares back at him.

"I-Izumi-kun...how long have you been standing there?"

"Oh, I came in somewhere around 'I'm falling in love with you,' or something like that."

"Oh, um. Well, what...what did you think?"

He smiles.

"You can't sing."

She stares at him for a moment, mouth gaping, before sticking her tongue out and turning the tape back on. She twists the little star-shaped volume knob up as high as it will go while that smile grows on his face, and just to spite him she sings even louder this time. 

 


	7. in a good mood

He was waiting for her when she got home.

The fact that Izumi was in such a good mood worried her more than anything; there were only so many reasons he would be wearing that particular smirk, and all of them meant trouble. 

"Welcome back, Me-chan," he said, as though it were perfectly normal for him to be lounging in the Koyama living room. Jonathan hovered behind him, echoing Izumi's greeting.

"Welcome back, Me-chaaaaaan."

"I-I-Izumi-kun!" Meroko could hear her own too shrill voice and forced a nervous little smile. "What are you doing here?"

Izumi's smirk widened as he asked, tone dripping saccharine, "I wanted to see you. Do I need a reason for that?"

"Yes. I mean, no! No! Of course not! It's just, you know, I wasn't expecting to see you. Here. Now."

"Oh." He looked up at her and asked, all too innocently, "Did you want me to leave?"

"You don't _have_ to...I mean, I never said that..."

"Well," he said, settling back into his chair, "Maybe I'll just wait until Ta-kun and Mi-ki come home. I don't suppose you know where they are, do you?"

He gave her a _look_ then, and she'd swear he was able to read her mind by doing it. 

"W-Well, that is, they're, I mean-"

"Oh, I see," Izumi interrupted, standing up. He crossed the room over to her, and the smirk he was wearing somehow managed to widen even more. "What you mean to say is, they'll be gone for a while."

"Y-yes. That's it. Not that they're doing anything suspicious. They're just out. Doing stuff." She waved her hands. "Normal shinigami-watching-a-twelve-year-old things."

"Of course they are." Izumi's hand was on her waist now. She wasn't sure when it had gotten there. "Which leaves you and me..."

"...and me," Jonathan interrupted. Izumi swatted at him, and the ghost flew across the room.

"So you're not going to go looking for them, or anything?" Meroko looked down at the hand on her waist, and...wait, he hadn't been that close a second ago...

"I suppose it can wait. Besides, I'd hate to interrupt the concert."

"The wha-!" 

Izumi cut her off by pressing his lips to hers; as she leaned in to his kiss, her arms somehow finding their way to his chest, she couldn't help thinking just how troublesome Izumi's good moods could be. 

 


	8. perfect blue

Izumi hates sunny days.

He prefers the rain, likes to stand out in the downpour and let the the heavy drops kiss cold on his skin. He likes the clouds to hang low and oppressive above him, grey-saturated with approaching storms. Rainy days are familiar, and he likes that. It reminds him that he's alone.

He really hates sunny days, summer afternoons colored with an endless, perfect blue sky. Sometimes the rain follows him on those cursed days, leaks out from deceptive tufts of white cloud, and this is the worst kind of day; because it is all too easy to imagine the clear rain into her tears, and it is the knowledge that she still exists somewhere far beyond him that twists his solitude into something unbearable.


	9. red

Red is not her favorite color. 

Izumi does not so much say that it looks good on her, not really, but he says that it's a fitting color, and that's as close as Meroko can expect to get from him. She wears red because she thinks it will make him notice her more. He doesn't. 

White is her favorite color, but Izumi says that it isn't really a color, so it doesn't count. She likes it anyway. It reminds her of clean things, of purity and innocence. Sometimes she thinks that if she could wrap herself in white then she could be all of those things again, but Meroko never was very good at lying.

It's a cold, grey day when Izumi tells her he never wants to see her again. The sky is overcast, and the rain is just starting to fall when he turns his back on her for the last time. She watches him walk away, staring at the yellow-and-black afterimage he left behind, while the rain and tears shower kisses on red taffeta and white lace. 

 


	10. candy

She wondered what it would be like to kiss him. 

She imagined their lips first meeting with a great deal of passion: mouths parting, tongues sliding, and breath gasping.She wondered what it would taste like: all sugar-sweet candy flavored, or else something bitter, honey-dark and licorice-sour. She practiced what she might say afterwards, "I love you" and "I'll never leave you" and "You're my one-and only for ever and ever-after." Sometimes she went so far as to fill in his reply, but the words she thought for him never sounded quite genuine.  

Much later, she looks back on their first kiss and wonders why it didn't live up to all her daydreams.  

 


	11. if only i could make you mine

"If only I could make you mine..."

It was raining when she said it. She called out to him, but her words got lost, drowned somewhere in the cold, grey downpour. He didn't turn around to see the water melt into tears on her cheeks.

_"If only I could make you mine..."_  

The words hadn't meant much to him, at the time.

Then, things changed.

She moved on.

It didn't take her long to find someone else, someone new to ignore her. She loved him, Izumi could tell. She loved him, and Izumi could tell by the way her face lit, the too eager enthusiasm in her voice; she loved him, but he didn't love her and Izumi could tell because he never noticed the motion of her fingers gracing her lips, paused in anticipation of kisses never to come. It hurt her. Izumi could tell.

And so he caught her one day, grabbed her thin arm and pulled her close to whisper, 

"If only I could make you mine..."

The heartbreak in her eyes stopped him from finishing that sentence. 

 


End file.
